With the digital age dawning, businesses are under mounting pressure to become more agile if they want to compete. This has led to a huge focus on cloud, big data and mobile, but what is often forgotten is that these digital services are delivered on an underlying network infrastructure.

One of the concepts that has captured the networking world's imagination in recent years quite has been software defined networking or SDN. But what concrete value can SDN bring to businesses? And how might it transform the data center and the IT department?

ETCIO.com in partnership with Dimension Data, Cisco and F5 Networks hosted a two city session on the topic of "Is Software Defined Networking Ready for Prime Time?" to find out the potential of software defined networking and what CIOs need to know as they transition into a software-defined future.

The sessions, held in Mumbai on 8th June and in Bangalore on 10th June, was attended by around 100 senior IT executives from large and medium enterprises across verticals.

Some of the key discussion points raised during the sessions included how enterprises can better support their digital enterprise journey by automating their data centre, improving operational efficiency, simplifying network operations and securing their data centre with software-defined programmable digital infrastructure.

Ashwani Mishra, ETCIO.com set the tone for both the sessions, and was followed by Lim Char-Boo, SDN BDM, Dimension Data AP who spoke on the topic of "Towards a Programmable Digital Infrastructure." He emphasized that data is at the core of digital transformation and IT leaders should start laying the foundations for fit-for-purpose infrastructures that support the new data paradigm.

"It's about adopting a business-focused approach to building your infrastructure, as opposed to a technology-centric one. Keeping up with the rate of change requires calls for automation," Char-Boo said. He also spoke about SDN and NFV, DevOps adoption, Openstack and the various ways in which networks be automated.

Speakers from F5 gave their perspectives on the elements that were needed to lay the foundation of a Digital Enterprise. They stated that the foundation of digital transformation can be achieved by focusing on making the infrastructure more agile; driving better speed through automation and extracting better intelligence from daily operations.

The panel discussion in both the cities was moderated by ETCIO.com and the panel presented their views around the challenges in their journey towards Digital Transformation and how they view SDN adoption.

"The main issue with SDN is that it's new. Because of this infancy, many believe SDN implementations are not ready for prime time. One because of the vendor support and another because of SDN compatibility based on standards," said K Suresh, Head-IT, Tata AIG General Insurance.

"Secured Internet & mobility of things to allow compute anywhere, anytime and on any device along with control through Software applications & virtual Infrastructure & Networks will be the next big things in the industry," said Suresh A Shan, Head - MMFSL BITS, Mahindra Finance.

Ramchandra Nelly, Director-IT at NetApp was of the view that SDN has the potential to make significant improvements to service request response times, security, and reliability. "The growing demands of video and mobile solutions are becoming tied to outcomes that matter to businesses. This means networks need to be more agile and scalable. To keep up with data growth, CIOs will invest in technology where networks can be configured or reconfigured remotely using software. It may not ready for prime time today, but enterprises need to be prepared," he said.